Subject: redherringfication of lojban

From: "michael helsem" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 15:07:54 -0000

(from alt.language.artificial:)

Since the death of James Cooke Brown, inventor 
of Loglan, there have been calls for the 
reunification of the Loglan and Lojban movements. I think it's a
good idea, and it's also an opportunity to make some changes in
the basic structure of 
the language(s) without reducing the advantages. What follows
is a proposal I've formulated to send out to any interested
persons: 

(in reaction to calls for reunification) 
Or, maybe better yet, since total relexification seems to be in
the cards, redo the vocabulary a la my suggestion of many
years ago. To summarize: 

Redefine word-shape. CV & CVV to remain as little words, but
predicates to have the shape of nCnV (excluding CV(V), of
course. This involves 
changing n,m,r,l (plus q for the 'ng' phoneme) to the vowel
classification, tho they are not to be 
considered vowels in the definition of little words. Complexes will
be made 
by simple juxtaposition (thereby doing away with allomorphs),
and the inclusion of a lw (I originally suggested 'sa' as a
separator between preds that 
are not meant to form complexes). If you look at a random text
of Loglan, you'll see that very few 'sa's would be necessary.
Thus: 

to blu sa faul = the blue bird 
to blufaul = the bluebird 

And, rather than derive vocabulary by the 
traditional method, I recommend choosing words from languages, 
beginning with the
largest, based on how well they fit the word-shape, as in 'blu' and 
'faul' above. A quick
look at English, Hindi, and Spanish show that a _lot_ of vocabulary 
can be 
easily derived from just those three languages. 

Finally, neither 'loglan' nor 'lojban' would fit the new word-shape, 
so I suggest 'Braunlan,' in

honor of JCB. 

--Rex F. May [email-masked]

(I can't seem to get a message sent to the Lojban newsgroup. I'd 
appreciate it if any of
you who 
can would forward this to it. Thanks.)